Get ready to watch an angry, fearful, medievalist oil kingdom notorious for its spectacular record on human rights and women’s rights, and so fond of lashings and beheadings, pontificating on the global stage about…human rights.

The people are demoralized…The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists…

Regime forces and Syrian rebels fighting for control of a small but strategic town in the country’s embattled northern province of Aleppo have killed at least 20 people, most of them civilians, activists said Friday.

“Allowing the ruling regime in Syria to kill its people and burn them with chemical weapons in front of the entire world and without any deterrent or punishment is clear proof and evidence of the UN Security Council’s inability to perform its duties and shoulder its responsibilities,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said.

“We are surprised by Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented decision,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “The kingdom’s arguments arouse bewilderment and the criticism of the UN Security Council in the context of the Syria conflict is particularly strange,” it added.

“Saudi Arabia and Chad have abysmal records on human rights,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based U.N. Watch, founded 20 years ago to monitor United Nations compliance with the principles of its charter. “Repressive regimes crave this undue and false legitimacy.”

“The suicide car bombing attack was carried out simultaneously with a heavy-machine gunfire by the militants on the 111th Brigade ‘s command center in the district of Ahwar in Abyan province,” the official told Xinhua by phone.

Four former guards of the notorious private security firm Blackwater face new manslaughter charges from the US DoJ over a 2007 shooting in Baghdad. The original charges were dropped in 2009, a month before a scheduled trial.

Dozens of Palestinians suffered from excessive tear gas inhalation and one was wounded after being shot by a tear gas canister as Israeli forces opened fire on demonstrators in the West Bank town of Bilin on Friday afternoon.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin Friday and called on Israel to restrain its settlement activities, which she said were jeopardizing the newly renewed peace talks with the Palestinians.

Billing the figures as a “drastic rise,” Peace Now said 44 percent of the new construction had taken place east of Israel’s vast separation barrier which cuts through the occupied West Bank, and 32 percent fell to the east of it.

Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land : Video –

About 60,000 African migrants have arrived in Israel since 2006, fleeing unrest in their home countries. But upon arrival in the ostensibly democratic country, the migrants have faced intense persecution and have been branded as “infiltrators” by right-wing politicians and activists.

Report: U.S. considering freeing up seized Iranian assets:

The Obama administration is considering freeing up Iranian assets if Tehran takes specific steps to curb its nuclear program, a senior administration official said.

In Friday’s attack, gunmen opened fire at the police officer as he walked near his home in the city of el-Arish, an Egyptian security official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

Suspected Renamo guerrillas killed seven Mozambican soldiers in an ambush on Thursday near the former rebel group’s remote mountain hideout, local media said, the latest flare-up in a simmering insurgency.

This is an edited extract of a letter sent home last week by Alexandra Harris, one of the six Britons held on piracy charges in Russia following a Greenpeace protest against oil drilling in the Arctic.

Officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said on Friday they detected 400,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances – including strontium – at the site, a level 6,500 times higher than readings taken on Wednesday, NHK World reported.

El Salvador has one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world. A side-effect is that women who suffer miscarriages are sometimes suspected of inducing an abortion – and can even be jailed for murder.

U.S. debt jumps a record $328 billion – tops $17 trillion for first time:

The giant jump comes because the government was replenishing its stock of “extraordinary measures” – the federal funds it borrowed from over the last five months as it tried to avoid bumping into the debt ceiling.

China to push for “YUAN” to be alternative to “Dollar” in fear of next Washington Drama:

Analysts predict investors faced with a U.S. default would try to sell dollars for yuan, forcing China’s central bank to either buy up dollars at a time when the government issuing them isn’t honoring its obligations or allow a rapid increase in the yuan’s value that would hurt exports and worsen the country’s credit bubble.

The U.S. debt spiral cannot go on indefinitely. Our debt is growing far, far more rapidly than our GDP is, and therefore our debt is completely and totally unsustainable. The Chinese understand what is going on, and when the dust settles they plan to be the last ones standing.

Expectations that the Federal Reserve will have to keep its easy-money policies in place for longer following the partial U.S. government shutdown pushed the dollar close to its lowest point of the year against the euro and U.S. Treasury debt prices to their highest point since July.